Little Less Talk, Lot More Action

Mack: Sketch. Coloured pencils on toned paper, 5 x 7″. Copyright 2008, Tania Nault. 

Now that I’m back from visiting family and it’s the first Monday of 2008, it seems like a perfect time to think about the year ahead, and to take Maggie up on her recent resolution/butt-kicking offer. Towards that end, here are my artistic goals for 2008:

1. Daily drawing: exactly what it says, I will draw every day. As I’ve taken on more commissioned work, I have been creating more finished pieces (for the record I’m not complaining about) and that’s been good. But it actually means I’m drawing less and less, and that’s not so good. I will post some of my efforts here, so what that means is that, at least until it warms up outside, you’ll be seeing a lot more of Mack… (see above).

2. Blogging: daily, Monday through Friday; with weekends off. The only exceptions will be for travel to Internet-free zones, i.e. the cabin or my parent’s farm.

3. Web site: January will see some significant overhaul; after that, monthly updates.

4.  Networking: basically, I suck at this, so if I meet one new person in 2008 and successfully remember his/her name at our second meeting it’ll be a 100% improvement over 2007. Seriously, I need to take better care of the contacts I do have and make more, which will mean creating a formal contact list by the end of March, making contact with everyone on the list twice throughout the year (once in the Spring and again in the Fall) and growing the list by 10% over the year. (I know this sounds like a “gimme” but I think it will be my greatest challenge.)

5.  Entrepreneurial: I need to learn more about making sales and marketing, but I hardly even know where to begin. I think this will be my “research” related goal for the year (research is a real “gimme” for me, but the topic will be the challenge). And to keep it in the action category, I will ”test drive” at least one thing I’ve learned, shall we say, quarterly (yeah, that sounds business-like). Uugh, maybe I should just change this one to: learn how to spell the word “entrepreneurial” without using spell-check.

6. Paperwork: the last weekend of every month I’ll be doing “the books” for that month. (See, there’s a reason for the “no blogging on weekends” thing.)

7. Creative writing: What I’m hoping is that this isn’t it. I enjoy writing, and I do a fair bit of it, but 2007 saw me doing a lot of “non-fiction” writing and practically zero creative writing. My husband and kids gave me some new haiku books for Christmas and I’ve fallen in love with them (haiku poems, I was never out of  love with my family) all over again. I will write one new haiku each week and, to keep me honest, I will post them here. Maybe I’ll even pair some with drawings and make some contemporary haiga.

I think that about covers it for the year. I have a calendar all laid out in my studio, ready to track my progress. So, Happy New Year to All!